The present article proposes a new method to assess distances between sequences of states, belonging to, for instance, event histories. It is based on the number of moves needed to turn one sequence into another sequence. This number of moves is standardized by relating it to the number of moves needed to turn the sequence into its reverse. Weighting it in different manners by the number of common elements in both sequences yields three different agreement measures, suited for different kinds of research questions. Life history data from 494 young adults show that applying our agreement measure to these data can yield insight in interesting relationships, otherwise not readily obtained.
SUMMARYIn this paper we provide a model of interviewer-respondent interaction in survey interviews. Our model is primarily focused on the occurrence of problems within this interaction that seem likely to affect data quality. Both conversational principles and cognitive processes, especially where they do not match the requirements of the respondent's task, are assumed to affect the course of interactions. The cognitive processes involved in answering a survey question are usually described by means of four steps: interpretation, retrieval, judgement and formatting. Each of these steps may be responsible for different overt problems, such as requests for clarification or inadequate answers. Such problems are likely to affect the course of the interaction through conversational principles which may cause, for example, suggestive behaviour on the part of the interviewer, which may in turn yield new problematic behaviours. However, the respondent may not be the only one who experiences cognitive problems; the interviewer may also have such problems, for example with respect to explaining question meaning to the respondent. Thus the model proposed here, unlike most of the other models which concentrate on the respondent, tries to incorporate cognitive processes and conversational principles with respect to both interviewer and respondent. In particular, the model looks at how cognitive processes and conversational principles affect both the interaction between interview participants and the quality of the eventual answers.
Although telephone interviewing is one of the major data collection methods used in survey research and response rates have been declining for years, the effects of the interviewers' voice characteristics on the cooperation of respondents have hardly been studied. The decision to participate in a telephone survey results from a complex of factors (Dillman, Gallegos, & Rencher, 1976; Groves & Couper, 1998; Groves & McGonnacle, 2001). Yet, the interviewers' voice characteristics may be particularly important, as visible aspects of communication are absent. Since our aim was to evaluate the impact of the interviewers' voice characteristics as such, we restricted our study to the first stage of the introduction, namely the interviewer reading the introductory text. The great majority of refusals to participate in a telephone interview occur immediately after this first stage (Dijkstra & Smit, 2002; Maynard & Schaeffer, 1997; Oksenberg & Cannell, 1988). Because no persuasion techniques are applied during this stage, such voice characteristics as pitch or speech rate may therefore affect the first reaction of the recipient. The few studies that have been performed on this matter (Hüfken & Schäfer, 2003; three studies in Oksenberg & Cannell, 1988) concerned one or two of the following measures: (1) voice characteristics established by objective acoustic measures; (2) judges' ratings of voice characteristics; and (3) judges' ratings of the (supposed) recipients' impression of personal characteristics of the interviewer. Our research project was designed to extend these studies by (a) utilizing each of the three measures jointly; (b) applying the measures to interview introductions from a large-scale household survey, and (c) relating the measures to the interviewers' cooperation rates (being a specification of response rates, as explained later) actually obtained in that household survey as well as to the rated willingness of judges to grant an interview. Thus, our research question is formulated as follows: Do the (perceived) interviewers' voice characteristics and personal characteristics relate to cooperation rates in telephone interviews, and if so, is there a plausible theoretical explanation for these relationships? The authors are indebted to Edith Smit, University of Amsterdam, for her kind permission to employ the tape recordings of the household survey interviews on mass media advertising (Smit & Neijens, 2000). The authors thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful comments.
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